Tagged: status updates

May 12th, 2009

Facebook Sans Facebook.com: How I’ve Automated My Facebook Use

I attended a social media think tank meeting yesterday, and while we were introducing ourselves and explaining what we do for our livings and how we use social media, something occurred to me: I rarely go to Facebook.com any more. I chalk some of this up to Facebook’s new format, which I don’t whole-heartedly find easy to use, but I rarely login to Facebook because I have automated all of my Facebook tasks to make me look like I’m online and to send Facebook functions to me. I thought I might share these automated functions with you today to a) educate you and b) find out if there’s anyone else like me out there.

Status Updates via TweetDeck

First off, the Status Update. For a long time, I sent everything I posted to Twitter to my Facebook status. Yes, there’s an app for that. Turns out, my Facebook friends are not the same audience as my Twitter friends, so I turned off that function because I was annoying them and myself. But I was still too lazy to login to Facebook to make status updates. Then TweetDeck released a new version of itself, which included Facebook status functionality and allowed me to send tweets to Twitter, Facebook, or both.

At the same time, TweetDeck will also collect the Facebook status updates from my friends and put them in their own TweetDeck column. Now I have a running feed of what my friends are saying on Facebook. I am so lazy.

Notes via RSS Feed

Some people choose to use their Facebook Notes like a blog, and aside for feeling sorry for them for not having real blogs, I don’t have a ton of time to read through all their memes about high school and their kids. But I still feel compelled to do something with those notes. After all, something might be interesting once in a blue moon. Facebook creates an RSS feed of my friends’ notes, so I read those notes in Google Reader. While Facebook’s RSS generator does a lousy job of maintaining any semblance of formatting Notes allows, I get an general idea of what’s going on in the note, and if I need formatting, I can go back to Facebook for it.

Essential Email Notifications

Some notifications on Facebook are essential to know about pronto. I’m thinking Message notifications and Wall postings primarily, but I also want to know if I’ve been tagged in a note, photo, or video or if someone has commented on anything of mine. Facebook emails me every time something of this sort happens on my profile, and those emails go in a tidy little folder in Gmail, so they don’t clutter up my inbox. The important thing is that these notifications are sent to me; I don’t have to fetch them by logging in. If they require action, I can login at my leisure.

I find some notifications that Facebook offers pesky and choose not to receive notification of them because the information they provide does not warrant immediate action. For example, being invited to a group. That can wait. Being invited to an event. I’m antisocial and not in college, so that can wait. Being added as someone’s friend. That can wait. (Because if we’re not already friends on Facebook, well, you get the picture…)

My Self-Declared Best Practices

I follow a few self-declared best practices to keep my Facebook time to a minimum. For one, I rarely add applications. The ones I do add usually have some function that allows me to do something in Facebook automatically. The others are silly and a waste of time, and I block them. I also rarely chat on Facebook. I rarely chat period. I actually am not a fan of chatting unless you’re a really close friend. And when I can, I try to move Message conversations into email. (Seriously, I really hate the Message function in Facebook. Let’s face it, those are essentially emails, and emails belong in my Gmail Inbox. Period.)

My One Facebook Vice

Now, the one thing I have no qualms about logging in to Facebook for is posting photos. I have no problem logging in to post my photos on Facebook. I do have a problem logging in to look at photos on Facebook because I can waste so much time looking at pictures. And then when I don’t look at them, I miss some good ones, and that sucks. Unfortunately, there is no good way to be notified of those automatically.

I hope you understand that I’m not anti-Facebook. I’m just a firm believer that information should come to me and that I shouldn’t have to check Facebook every other second to see if someone did something new. Maybe I’m a little bit lazy, but that’s fine with me, darn it.

So am I wrong? Is there something inherently awesome in Facebook that I must be logged in 24/7? Or are you just like me, logging in only for the bare Facebook essentials? Tell me!

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Posted in brilliantly creative | 1 Comment »

February 27th, 2009

Pew Provides Twitter Demographics & Insight for Church Use

Man, I’ve been reading a ton of crazy awesome stuff this week. My brain is going to explode. Well, actually, that’s what this blog is for, brain shrapnel. (That would make an awesome blog title. I should buy the domain name.)

Today’s reading isn’t really all that new, especially in Internet terms. February 12, the Pew Internet & American Life Project released a study on the use of Twitter by online adults. You probably heard all about it two weeks ago, but I’m reading it for the first time. (And BTW, a huge thanks to Pew for their incredible research project. I think half of my thesis sources were from them.)

First off, my one beef with this study: Pew’s definition of Twitter includes “use of status messages or mood and location messages on a social network site.” While I agree that all these tweets and status updates are virtually the same thing, calling them all Twitter is misleading. But now you know. Let’s get to the good stuff.

Not surprisingly, Twitter has been most embraced by young adults, 18-24 and 25-34. Perfect, that will be my argument for getting the twentysomethings at LPC to get on Twitter. But let’s think about it. Five years ago when Facebook launched, it was launched to the public, the older young adults were in college–Facebook’s target. And the younger group was in high school, Facebook’s second target. It’s also important to note that after age 35, the use of Twitter drops to 10%. That means I’ll have to work on getting many of the parents at LPC to use these services.

Another big “surprise,” Twitterers are more likely to use wireless devices when making updates. In fact 76% of them use the Internet wirelessly (17), and they’re more likely to use their cell phones to text and go online than the rest of the cell-phone using population. When we get bored, we whip out the laptop or iPhone and see what everyone else is up to online. If LPC’s people aren’t wireless in one form or another, the chances that they’re going to tweet are slim. Good to know.

I love this: “The use of Twitter is highly intertwined with the use of other social media; both blogging and social network use increase the likelihood that an individual also uses Twitter” (9). I could’ve told you that. Social media is like crack. You start blogging, then you start reading other people’s blogs, then you follow them on Twitter or friend them on Facebook, and before you know it you’ve made friends with people you don’t even know (Hi, lifestudent and Lorraine!)

Pew presents a “portrait of a Twitter user” (12) and gives some key demographic information on Twitterers. For one, their median age is 31 (13), right around the median age at LifePoint. They’re also more racially and ethnically diverse, but that’s because the youngest American young adults are more diverse than the rest of the population (14). Twitterers can mostly be found in urban areas (35%), which is probably due to better Internet, wireless, and cell phone services in those areas. Because let’s face it, if you are using dialup in your rural neck of the woods, the last thing you want to do is waste time and bandwidth telling other people what you are doing, which is waiting for pages to load. Ozark presents a challenge. In the last 15 years, it’s grown from very rural to nearly urban. Internet and cell phone services have kept up, but there are many people who still live in what we call “the sticks.” Not that they’re rednecks or anything, but once you get out of city limits, Internet service often goes down the drain. And so does their Twittering.

Twitterers like getting their news on their mobile devices, and they’re less likely to use traditional media (like physical newspapers) to get their news. If this isn’t an argument to communicate LifePoint news via Twitter, I don’t know what is. Pew wraps up their report with this:

Twitter users engage with new and own technology at the same rates as other Internet users, but the ways in which they use the technology–to communicate, gather, and share information–reveals their affinity for mobile, untethered, and social opportunities for interaction. … Twitter … enhances these opportunities (22).

So I guess the key is to get our people the information they want so they can “communicate, gather, and share” it. The question remains, Are we providing the information that they want? I’d like to think we are, but it’s tough to tell. Communication around here seems to be one way, and there aren’t very many two-way conversations regarding the information we provide. Good thing? Bad thing? I’m not sure.

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Posted in church 2.0, tweeples guide | No Comments »

 

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